An even dozen mailboxes are clustered where the gravel road meets the paved one. A large, very old, rotten timber holds up 8 of them while the other four perch atop various posts that are as individual as the homeowners who added their mailbox to the row. In all, a very random collection with only one at the US Postal Service mandated 40″ height. Last Monday we all received notices from the post office that our mailboxes needed to meet the 40″ minimum. I responded with printed notes in each mailbox inviting all to a work party at 0900 Saturday to raise them all together. One man telephoned me to say he couldn’t make next Saturday, but wanted to help. […]

He is shaping up to be an excellent dog. Yeah, the German Shepherd Dog (GSD) side needs employment … OR ELSE … they self-employ … and the owners are guaranteed to not like their ideas. But, dang, they make great family dogs. I suspect Bosco’s ears are a month from standing up like proper GSD ears, but his head seems otherwise dominated by his American Pit Bull (APB) half. Both are described as athletic and strong; both traits desirable in a country dog. Puppy Chart .com estimates my 68.6-pound 5.6-month-old will be a 100-pound adult. *WARNING* Stay on top of training. You won’t want an out-of-control Big, Strong, Athletic, Inventive dog. Dogtime.com is an EXCELLENT reference tool. The peculiarities of […]

I apologize for the absence. I tried visiting an interesting-sounding article at some new ‘prepper’ website only to get my computer hopelessly infected. I lost a few days to installing a new operating system … and, sigh, ugh, rebuilding one link after another. My e-mail is still not functioning. Dang. I would rather run power tools through lumber than play games with computers.

Not in the way supercop Clint Eastwood used the phrase … No, I am truly appreciating the good fortune that put me here … and now. Not quite a year into The Great Cleanup And Rehabilitation of the farmstead and TODAY I got the Round Tuit designated to my workbench. Okay, it is a reloading bench with other potential uses. The trick was to lower my expectations. This one is “TEMPORARY”. That means it doesn’t have to be perfect, or even as close to that as my rudimentary woodworking skills usually gets. I do not compromise on the engineering. NOTHING I build breaks. Period. That would be gross failure. Nope, nope and more nope. But Pretty? Wuffo? Then I sit […]

Many of us have noticed that the sun seems intense this summer. A friend who works outdoors says he actually feels the sun abnormally burning, boring-into his skin. Another friend called yesterday reporting that their sophisticated photographic hobby drone refused to fly. It reported that: the electromagnetic field was too intense for the drone’s controls to operate. That took him to the Internet for investigation. Which, in turn, set him contacting friends to warn them about this intensity spike in solar energy reaching us. The Environmental Protection Agency publishes maps quantifying the intensity of sun rays striking our Earth. Reportedly, some places in Arizona and New Mexico are currently in a streak of unprecedented ratings of 14! The two maps […]

I came across the article below in Waking Times. It describes recognizing and escaping The Matrix that nearly all of us live in. I am somewhere on the trail from here to there; quite happy to be looking at the machinations and mayhem from outside the tumult. Not that I can be fully removed from, nor that it won’t take me along when it goes down, but I will at least understand where I am and why along the way. It is far more peaceful to know when to drift, when to swim, and in what direction rather that futilely thrashing and flailing. I have been pondering what I might post on our “Independence Day”. Of course I was […]